willya?’ Teddy asked, and Vern laughed, finally understanding that he was getting ribbed.
‘Go screw.’
Chris turned to me. ‘That train scare you, Gordie?’
‘Nope,’ I said, and sipped my Coke.
‘Not much, you sucker.’ He punched my arm.
‘Sincerely! I wasn’t scared at all.’
‘Yeah? You wasn’t scared?’ Teddy was looking me over carefully.
‘No. I was fuckm’ petrified.’
This slew all of them, even Vern, and we laughed long and hard. Then we just laid
back, not goofing anymore, just drinking our Cokes and being quiet. My body felt warm,
exercised, at peace with itself. Nothing in it was working crossgrain to anything else. I
was alive and glad to be. Everything seemed to stand out with a special dearness, and
although I never could have said that out loud I didn’t think it mattered – maybe that sense
of dearness was something I wanted just for myself.
I think I began to understand a little bit that day what makes men become daredevils. I
paid twenty dollars to watch Evel Knievel attempt his jump over the Snake River Canyon a couple of years ago and my wife was horrified. She told me that if I’d been born a
Roman I would have been right there in the Coliseum, munching grapes and watching as
the lions disembowelled the Christians. She was wrong, although it was hard for me to
explain why (and, really, I think she thought I was just jiving her). I didn’t cough up that twenty to watch the man die on coast-to-coast closed-circuit TV, although I was quite
sure that was exactly what was going to happen. I went because of the shadows that are
always somewhere behind our eyes, because of what Bruce Springsteen calls the darkness
on the edge of town in one of his songs, and at one time or another I think everyone wants
to dare that darkness in spite of the jalopy bodies that some . oker of a God gave us
human beings. No … not in spite of our jalopy bodies but because of them.
‘Hey, tell that story,’ Chris said suddenly, sitting up.
‘What story?’ I asked, although I guess I knew.
I always felt uncomfortable when the talk turned to my stories, although all of them
seemed to like them – wanting to tell stories, even wanting to write them down … that was
just peculiar enough to be boss, like wanting to grow up to be a sewer inspector or a
Grand Prix mechanic. Richie Jenner, a kid who hung around with us until his family
moved to Nebraska in 1959, was the first one to find out that I wanted to be a writer when
I grew up, that I wanted to do that for my full-time job. We were up in my room, just
fooling around, and he found a bunch of handwritten pages under the comic books in a
carton in my closet. What’s this! Richie asks. Nothin’, I say, and try to grab them back.
Richie held the pages up out of reach … I must admit that I didn’t try very hard to get them back. I wanted him to read them and at the same time I didn’t – an uneasy mix of
pride and shyness that has never changed in me very much when someone asks to look.
The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation – oh, I have one friend who
has done things like write stories in the display windows of bookshops and department
stores, but this is a man who is nearly crazy with courage, the kind of man you’d like to
have with you if you just happened to fall down with a heart attack in a city where no one
knew you. For me, it always wants to be sex and always falls short – it’s always that
adolescent handjob in ‘the bathroom with the door locked.
Richie sat right there on the end of my bed for most of the afternoon reading his way
through the stuff I had been doing, most of it influenced by the same sort of comic books
as the ones that had given Vern nightmares. And when he was done, Richie looked at me
in a strange new way that made me feel very peculiar, as if he had been forced to
reappraise my whole personality. He said, You’re pretty good at this. Why don’t you show
these to Chris? I said no, I wanted it to be a secret, and Richie said: Why… It ain’t pussy.
You ain’t no queer. I mean, it ain’t poetry.
Still, I made him promise not to tell anybody about my stories and of course he did and
it turned out most of them liked to read the stuff I wrote, which was mostly about getting
buried alive or some crook coming back from the dead and slaughtering the jury that had
condemned him in Twelve Interesting Ways or a maniac that went crazy and chopped a
lot of people into veal cutlets before the hero, Curt Cannon, ‘cut the subhuman,
screeching madman to pieces with round after round from his smoking .45 automatic.’
In my stories, they were always rounds. Never bullets.
For a change of pace, there were the Le Dio stories. Le Dio was a town in France, and
during 1942, a grim squad of tired American dog-faces were trying to re-take it from the
Nazis (this was two years before I discovered that the Allies didn’t land in France until
1944). They went on trying to re-take it, fighting their way from street to street, through
about forty stories which I wrote between the ages of nine and fourteen. Teddy was
absolutely made for the Le Dio stories, and I think I wrote the last dozen or so just for
him -by then I was heartily sick of Le Dio and writing things like Mon Dieu and Cherchez le Bochel and Fermez la portel In Le Dio, French peasants were always hissing to GI dogfaces to Fermez la portel But Teddy would hunch over the pages, his eyes big, his
brow beaded with sweat, his face twisting. There were times when I could almost hear
air-cooled Brownings and whistling 88s going off in his skull. The way he clamoured for
more Le Dio stories was both pleasing and frightening.
Nowadays writing is my work and the pleasure has diminished a little, and more and
more often that guilty, masturbatory pleasure has become associated in my head with the
coldly clinical images of artificial insemination: I come according to the rules and regs
laid down in my publishing contract. And although no one is ever going to call me the
Thomas Wolfe of my generation, I rarely feel like a cheat: I get it off as hard as I can
every fucking time. Doing less would, in an odd way, be like going faggot — or what that
meant to us back then. What scares me is how often it hurts these days. Back then I was
sometimes disgusted by how damned good it felt to write. These days I sometimes look at
this typewriter and wonder when it’s going to run out of good words. I don’t want that to
happen. I guess I can bear the pain as long as I don’t run out of good words, you know?
‘What’s this story?’ Vern asked uneasily. ‘It ain’t a horror story, is it, Gordie? I don’t
think I want to hear no horror stories. I’m not up for that, man.’
‘No, it ain’t a horror,’ Chris said. ‘It’s really funny. Gross, but funny. Go on, Gordie.
Hammer that fucker to us.’
‘Is it about Le Dio?’ Teddy asked.
‘No, it ain’t about Le Dio, you fuckin’ psycho,’ Chris said, and rabbit-punched him. ‘It’s
about this pie-eatin* contest.’
‘Hey, I didn’t even write it down yet,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but tell it’
‘You guys want to hear it?’
‘Sure,’ Teddy said. ‘Boss.’
‘Well, it’s about this made-up town, Gretna, I call it. Gretna, Maine.’
‘Gretna?’ Vern said, grinning. ‘What kind of name is that? There ain’t no Gretna in Maine.’
‘Shut up, fool,’ Chris said. ‘He just toldja it was made-up, didn’t he?’
‘Yeah, but Gretna, that sounds pretty stupid -‘
‘Lots of real towns sound stupid,’ Chris said. ‘I mean, what about Alfred, Maine? Or Saco, Maine? Or Jerusalem’s Lot? Or Castle-fuckin’-Rock? There ain’t no castle here.
Most town names are stupid. You just don’t think so because you’re used to ’em. Right,
Gordie?’
‘Sure,’ I said, but privately I thought Vern was right- Gretna was a pretty stupid name
for a town. I just hadn’t been able to think of another one. ‘So anyway, they’re having their
annual Pioneer Days, just like in Castle Rock -‘
‘Yeah, Pioneer Days, that’s a fuckin’ blast,’ Vern said earnestly. ‘I put my whole family in that jail on wheels they have, even fuckin’ Billy. It was only for half an hour and it cost